Intel pulled a surprise stunt and announced it will use a technology known as "strained silicon," along with a 90-nanometer technology, to make the next generation of Pentium 4 (dubbed Prescott). This will go head to head with the AMD silicon-on-insulator technology in next year's never-ending battle of the hot chip companies. There may be a slowdown in the economy, but progress marches to a different drummer.

Strained silicon stretches a layer of silicon in such a way that the electron flow increases radically. As far as I know, AmberWave Systems Corp. (www.amberwave.com) holds most of the key patents. The concept was dreamed up at MIT, and AmberWave was spun off in 1998 to exploit the concept. It's more an issue of making special wafers than anything else. IBM announced its version last year, claiming on its Web site to have "pioneered" the technology. Nobody is saying how Intel is managing to get these special wafers or who is going to make them. What's important is that without a lot of special design work, a chip using strained silicon will perform 20 percent better at the same clock speed. IBM claims a 35 percent performance boost. The Prescott chip is expected in late 2003.

News From Taiwan Dept.: According to the online trade journal DigiTimes, Dell and HP are the main combatants in a new round of notebook wars, and both companies are using at least two of the same Taiwanese contract makers. According to David Tzeng, writing for DigiTimes out of Taipei: "Local companies said the two clients are shying away from creating models from scratch and instead opting to squeeze from a single design as many models as possible that share the same parts to cut costs. For instance, HP's Presario 900, 1500, and 2800 and Evo N1000c, N1000v, and N800c, currently contracted with Arima Computer and LG Electronics, are all variations of the same design."

The main laptop and notebook makers in Taiwan are Arima, Compal, Inventec, LG Electronics, Quanta, and Wistron. As someone pointed out to me, most of the big American computer makers have become nothing more than competitive distributors of Asian computers. Though there is nothing wrong with this, the distribution game is typically a business with a 6 percent margin.

Meanwhile, in Taiwan it's believed that the market slump has bottomed out, as case makers and component orders have taken an upturn. Since they are at the beginning of the manufacturing cycle, perhaps things have turned around for good. Of course, this is contradicted by some reports from the big chip foundries saying that business is still bad.

Rocky Mountain High Dept.: I attended the one-of-a-kind Telluride Tech Festival in August and was fortunate enough to run into industry pioneer Alan Kay, who had finished a stint with Walt Disney Imagineering. While there, he managed to get a unique software system developed for the educational market. Called Squeak, it's available free as an open-source project at www.squeak.org.

Best described as Logo meets Smalltalk, Squeak is a classic implementation of a pure GUI object-oriented system that, although exceedingly powerful, is easy to usethough it does require an adjustment in thinking that can either be enlightening or frustrating. Kay used this program to produce an eye-popping PowerPoint-like presentation. I asked him about Squeak becoming a PowerPoint killer, and he said he'd work up some documentation if I wanted to play around with it for that purpose. I like PowerPoint, but it's getting trite. Vinton Cerf was at the conference and had the classic quote of the day: "Power corrupts; PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."

I'll let you know how Squeak turns out as a jazzy PowerPoint substitute. In the meantime, download a free copy of the software to play with.

Microsoft Watch Dept.: Kay and I also discussed Microsoft's .NET strategy and how it was a fundamental change in the way Microsoft wants to do software. Microsoft has never managed to be more than vague about the whole thing. So I had a meeting with EVP Jon Schwartz from Sun Microsystems the next day, and he of all people explained the Microsoft .NET strategy fully: better than anyone at Microsoft could ever do. Microsoft should hire him. In a nutshell, Microsoft wants to create an all-encompassing architecture that will scale top to bottom and be easily maintainable. Underlying the notion is the concept of world domination. It's that simple. (Wink.)

Whatever Happened to HomeRF? Dept.: Apparently, it's morphed into something called ZigBee. Look for this standard to show up as a low-data-rate home controller or some such thing. Even slower than Bluetooth, its claim to fame is power consumption that can make a battery last for years while running off a $2 chip. Its 250-Kbps max speed can be turned way down to 28 Kbps (the speed of an old modem); it can travel perhaps 130 meters. Exactly where this will fit into the scheme of things, I have no ideabut it can be tracked as IEEE 802.15.4 and is supported by companies such as Honeywell and Mattel. So perhaps that's where it's headed: thermostats and toys.

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About the Author

John C. Dvorak is a columnist for PCMag.com and the co-host of the twice weekly podcast, the No Agenda Show. His work is licensed around the world. Previously a columnist for Forbes, PC/Computing, Computer Shopper, MacUser, Barrons, the DEC Professional as well as other newspapers and magazines. Former editor and consulting editor for InfoWorld, he... See Full Bio

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